Graban, Tarez Samra. “Introduction: Renewing Comparative Methodologies,” Global Rhetorical Traditions, edited by Hui Wu and Tarez Samra Graban, Parlor Press, 2023, pp. xvii–xxxviii.
I'm running out of time on these notes, so I'm just going to copy down a few quotes from this introduction (and for the next, and last, article):
Whereas “stable” conceptualizations of language imply maintenance and preservation, “unstable” conceptualizations imply fluctuation and change based on the same circulatory factors that occur when dominant tongues become replaced by or subsumed within their modern variants. However, as the contributors to this volume aptly demonstrate, recovering rhetorical treatises in various languages does not necessarily mean tracing when and how a dominant language has given way to its variants, or establishing one language’s dominance over another. Rather, it means attending to the periods of textual mobility that allowed certain rhetorical practices to become vigorously and concurrently coopted or shared among diverse cultures and geographical spaces. (xvii-xviii, emphasis added)
The third need addressed by this collection is to develop analytic methodologies from rhetorical realignments and alternative frameworks for study6—frameworks that can be accessed by comparatists and non-comparatists alike. Our twenty-eight contributors examine rhetorical treatises to reveal intricate terminologies that may or may not bear resemblance to the so-called Western rhetorical tradition, disrupting the persistent dominance of a Pan-Hellenic core. (xviii)
One note I had about this second quote is that I imagine that they first had to establish that what they were looking at were "rhetorical treatises"--that is, they would have to have in mind what a rhetorical treatise might look like in that other culture. I'd like to know more about how they made these decisions, since it would help me in both my development of a comparative rhetoric course and in my own research project.
An additional barrier to making comparative rhetorical work accessible for many non-comparatists may be found in the fine lines and thin boundaries (perhaps, even, in certain misconceptions) that occur between the monikers of comparative, cultural, postcolonial, and transnational when they are used to describe rhetorical study. What differentiates their agendas from one another? When are those agendas conflated or confused? (xxii)
I guess we'd add decolonial to that list? I think we also have to deal with the comment of Ellen Cushman that criticizes the use of terms such as "comparative" and "cultural" in reference to rhetorics. If we're to take that idea seriously, does that mean that the organizational scheme of this book is wrong-headed?
The linkage between comparative and transnational is prevalent when we realize that chapters dedicated to articulating more contemporary indigenous practices—such as East African and Polynesian rhetorics, for example—disrupt our assumptions about who or what needs representation at all. This linkage is productively blurred inasmuch as our contributors seek alternatives to the same Afro-Eurasian longue durée frame that has traditionally dominated post-, anti-, and decolonial scholarship. (xxii)
I just want to say that this would also be true for people who are studying modern rhetorics, such as modern Asian rhetorics.
[T]he scholarship represented in this collection does not necessarily reject or deny Western influences on rhetorical histories or on critical perspectives; rather, it considers “the West” in its globalized and circulating notions. However, it encourages reflection on how scholars might reinvent key terms, identify critical dilemmas, and express new desires by distinguishing between “comparative,” “cross-cultural,” “indigenous,” and “nomadic” approaches to rhetorical studies in the coming historical moment. (xxiii)
The principal methodology driving this book is in the concept of rhetorical regions, which encompass more than language or geography or politics alone. What we present here as “regional” distinctions between chapters draws attention to how various rhetorical practices are not bound to a single nation, country, language, or culture, even if the practices are stabilized by one or more of those constraints at a time. Instead, a region’s rhetoricity is demonstrated through its utility and deployment—through the conscious re/construction of how time, space, history, and memory all interact to form what we recognize as a functioning rhetorical tradition (e.g., “Arabic and Islamic,” “Chinese,” or “Mediterranean”). (xxiii)
I'm afraid I don't quite understand what is meant by "rhetorical regions." Maybe this is something we can talk about in the seminar?
[W]e ask how scholars can locate sources of culturally specific rhetorical traditions by avoiding the representational traps that often occur when comparative associations are driven by binary logic and by acknowledging that “border-crossings of all kinds are unfolding on an unprecedented scale.” (xxiv)
I draw on Jerry Won Lee’s “semioscape” as an operative concept for our own work—a phenomenon that describes the reinvention of nation-ness among globally mobile communities. ... [T]he idea of semioscapes guides our collection’s methodology in three ways. First, the semioscape is ... powerful testament to the many linguistic and cultural identifications that are exercised by ethnic groups when and wherever they settle, and it extends beyond, or cuts across, purely national or political lines. (xxiv)
Second, the semioscape implies movement, migration, and flow. (xxiv)
Finally, and most significantly for our project, the semioscape accounts for diasporic rhetorical traditions, highlighting that a rhetorical region is best recognized in the constellation of moments showing how its particular traditions have spread, rooted, and grown. (xxv)
[My question about "diasporic"--are there examples of diasporic traditions in this book, such as diasporic Chinese traditions?]
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